Reminds me of when I was looking for good workflows for note taking tools like Obsidian that would be relevant to me, but so many of the big articles on how to do various types of note organizations strategies all used theirs to organize notes on videos and conferences they had watched or gone to about note taking.

Reading the article I did not ask at all the question for why they're doing this.

I see no reason why that is important.

Yeah, can anyone else that does this explain what the point is? Genuinely curious.

That's what the business model of Doulingo is based on

I think they just enjoy memorizing things. Roughly the equivalent of meeting someone who runs 10 miles a day. They enjoy it and it has some benefit to their life as well, even though they are probably far past the point of diminishing returns.

His homepage says that he likes memorizing things. There is utility in doing something you enjoy for the sake of it.

Random example: In my last job I would point out JS language features that would have made my coworker's code more concise and canonical.

I hadn't done any JS coding beyond a few examples from a tutorial.

There's no way I would have retained that knowledge otherwise.

There are many such examples. In general it's extremely useful for retaining things you are not going to develop muscle memory for.

"Memorizing by doing" is great if you're doing often. What if you're not?

Very cool, and have you actually used forest as memory palace ? this and chunking + imagery mapped to digits, is what got suggested to me just now by chatbot as technique that memory athletes use; got curious myself but never tried something like this.

1. I enjoy it.

2. I like trivia competitions.

3. I like making and using my own software.

4. Memorizing facts is an underrated way to become a better software engineer. Not the best way or even close to the best way, but an underrated way!

5. It enriches my experience of the world (I plan to write more about this soon).

Yes, different strokes I guess but I can't imagine just using flashcards for random information. And you'd think someone who wrote(maybe vibe coded?) a flashcard program would be calculate that by hand.

If you have the software for that in a repo somewhere, I'd be interested in seeing how you made that work as well.

Would love to know more -- what software do you use?

I would love to hear more about your setup!

1. I have a long commute, and I have about 45 minutes of walking per day, during which I like to do my reviews. 2. I've put serious effort into reducing the friction in my software in order to reduce time per review. 3. You've got to do something when you're on the toilet, right?

I did 10k reviews. Admittedly, very streakily - so spurts intense study for 2-3 months than several months off - I think about 2.5 spurts total. I felt pretty wrung out after. 51k is a ton, congrats!

Memorization focuses on the set of things you want to recall, but don't use often enough to naturally remember.

This is most peritent for language learning because you need to 'bootstrap' a large set of words and grammar, and you can't use all of them often enough to put them in long-term memory (at first).

Aside from foreign languages, I also use flashcards for English - more difficult words that show up rarely enough that I can't remember their definitions - and country flags.

For general learning too, if you need to keep looking something up over and over but can't seem to remember it, flashcards will bootstrap that into your brain and make future learning smoother. Obviously Internet/AI can help - but LLMs can't explain 100% of a topic in their reply, they always assume some level of abstraction, and the higher-level it is the faster you can absorb a topic.

See my other comments here for some of my motivations, but also:

Even in the Internet age, getting the latency from "fast" to "effectively zero" has a lot of value for staying in flow, synethesizing information, etc. Your memory is the ultra-low-latency fact retrieval system you always have. No, you definitely don't want to use it for everything, but it definitely does complement modern tools in important ways.

How do you decide what to immerse yourself in? Do you just search for things independently or do you have a way of selecting content based on your level?

What are your cards about? The author seems to be learning for the sake of learning.

1. My algorithm is probably inefficient, and a big Q1 2026 goal is to figure out where the inefficiencies are and (better) to get a better system for addressing and remediating them in an automated way.

2. A lot of my cards were also made in 2025 (and 2024), so I'm probably much farther to the left of you on the learning curve, on average.

I have done a lot of algorithmic experiments. I wouldn't say I noticed a big difference in recall, but my graphs say that there definitely is one!

Ok, I've put that link in the toptext as well.

At this point there's just a reflex I have that says "ah, I'd like to remember that." It's the same feeling whether I'm learning something for trivia, for work, or for personal reasons.

The point of spaced repetition is to have you recall something right when you're just about to forget it. If you recall after it's been forgotten, that means you're forgetting a lot more, which means the system isn't working.

This is a really good question!

1. As others have said, the idea is to study something before you forget.

2. It's hard to predict when you're going to forget something, so you do wind up studying a bunch of stuff before you really have to. It's a limitation of prediction (and also of the technology as developed so far).

3. It really is pleasant to work to recall things even when you succeed at it. It does "freshen them up" in your memory. And sometimes just the experience of seeing a fact can be pleasant. (A lot of us review familiar things for the joy of it in other domains--movies, etc.)

That sounds nearly perfect for FSRS [1], the default spaced repetition algorithm used by Anki, which aims at estimating the time it takes for memory stability to decline from 100% to 90%. At the estimated 90% stability point, FSRS would require a review, so naturally a mature deck of flashcards would hover between 90-100% stability.

1. https://expertium.github.io/Algorithm.html

I prune some, but less than I probably should, and less than most other serious SR people do. I'm more interested in techniques for (i) raising the quality of even my lower-value cards and (ii) figuring out how to actually learn the stuff that people think of as "leeches."

That was my first thought - "Is this guy training for Jeopardy?"

Bullets 2,3, and 4

* I'm using my own software

* I did 301,432 flashcard reviews in 2025.

* Those reviews covered 52,764 distinct cards.